Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Another one of those libertarian-leaning books. And like Who Killed the Constitution?, this one
leaves me rethinking much of what I once thought about the country I live in.

Bovard has two main observations to make. The first is that, despite
popular opinion to the contrary, “we the people” are not in control of our
government.

In 1693,
William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, wrote what could be the motto for
modern American government. “Let the people think they govern, and they will be
governed.” Rulers endlessly assure people that they are in charge—while
creating agency after agency, program after program that people can neither
comprehend nor control. Americans’ political thinking is becoming akin to the
recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance—a series of bromides that sink into the
mind and stifle independent, critical thought.

It wasn’t always this way. Early in our nation’s history, the majority
of people were suspicious of federal power, and actively worked to curtail it.

Wariness
toward government was one of the most important bulwarks of American freedom.
Representative government worked partly because people were skeptical of
congressmen, presidents, and government officials across the board.

But Bovard says that all began to change in the 1900s, and really
accelerated during the New Deal, when “government was placed on a pedestal.”

And it seems that the people most enamored with government are the
people in the government itself. There is one vignette, about the publication
by the Harvard University Press of a book titled Why People Don’t Trust Government, that is quite revealing.

Britain’s
Times Higher Education Supplement published an interview with Joseph Nye, the
book’s senior editor and dean of the Kennedy School. The Times reported that
“the book, and its subject matter, are being taken seriously in the highest
political circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Nye was among a group of
American experts led by Hillary Clinton who recently came to Britain for a
seminar on the book attended by, among others, Tony Blair, who left clutching a
copy.” The book—and Nye’s move from the Clinton administration to Harvard—was
prompted by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Nye explained: “I was preoccupied
that people could become so anti-government that they were capable of an act
like that.” Why People Don’t Trust Government had no mention of Waco. Nye
lamented: “All the evidence is that government and politicians are at least as
honest as they were in the past, but that isn’t the impression people are
getting.” Three days after the interview was published, a Washington Post
banner headline heralded the start of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Monica Lewinsky is not a troubling as what
happened at Waco, but the point is well made. The people in government and
their academic colleagues sit there and scratch their heads, wondering why the
people don’t trust them, while scandal after scandal pours out of Washington.
It’s frankly laughable that they can be both so educated and so blind. Bovard
sums it up well.

The tone
of disbelief in Why People Don’t Trust Government is at times almost comical.
Harvard professor Gary Orren wrote: “The public has not only lost faith in the
ability of government to solve problems, but it has actually come to believe
that government involvement will just make matters worse.”

But it’s not all fun and games. This lack of trust in government has a
darker side, and I’m not talking about blowing up buildings or other acts of
domestic terrorism. Bovard also quotes Gary Wills, from A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government.

Many
people find themselves surprised at the sympathy they can feel for even
outrageous opponents of government—as was demonstrated when popular support
blossomed for the anti-government forces holed up with David Koresh at Waco,
Texas, or with Randy Weaver, who defied the FBI at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. … But the
real victims of our fear are not those faced with such extreme action. … The
real victims are millions of poor or shelterless or medically indigent who have
been told, over the years, that they must lack care or life support in the name
of their very own freedom. Better for them to starve than to be enslaved by
“big government.” That is the real cost of our anti-government values.

This makes me think of much of the modern Republican Party, comprised
of low and middle-income white America, who stand to lose more than they stand
to gain by fighting for the rhetorical liberty that so many false Republican
prophets proclaim during their stump speeches.

Loss of control over lawmakers and the resulting increase in
distrusting government is, I think, an observable phenomenon, but Bovard’s
second observation is more sinister. It is that our perception of democracy as
a grand liberating force is flawed, and that this perception, or misperception,
is directly responsible for our enslavement. Bovard puts it this way:

The issue
is not whether democracy is good or evil, but that seeing democracy as an
absolute good open the gates to great evil.

And:

The more
people who believe democracy is failsafe, the more likely it will fail.
Attention Deficit Democracy produces the attitudes, ignorance, and arrogance
that pave the way to political collapse.

I find it to be a persuasive argument. The thought that Who Killed the Constitution? exposed me
to—that a government that is responsible for policing itself will inevitably
drift towards at best cronyism and at worst tyranny—seems equally applicable to
democracies as much as other forms of government. Why would they offer any
special protection?

So what does Bovard prescribe for this malaise? I’m not sure he’s clear
on that, but it is in his Conclusion that he comes closest to issuing a call to
action.

It is
time to de-sacralize democracy. Being crowned a winner by the Electoral College
does not give one American the right to dispose of all other Americans’ lives
and liberties. If we want a new birth of freedom, we must cease glorifying
oppressive political machinery. Most of what the government does has little or
nothing to do with “the will of the people.” The combination of ignorant voters
and conniving politicians is far more likely to ruin than rescue this nation.
In the same way that our forefathers in the 1770s refused to be grabbed off the
streets and pressed into His Majesty’s navy, so today’s Americans must cease
permitting politicians to impose one scheme and fraud after another.

It’s an appealing message for me, but I am not sure how practical it
is. Most Americans are uninterested in politics and the activities of
politicians. Those that are interested are lost (I think) in an ideological
battle between a Left and a Right that increasingly have more in common than
the small issues that separate them. I do agree with Bovard when he writes:

The sin
of most political activists today is that they want to be anti-conservative or
anti-liberal, anti-Republican or anti-Democratic, without being anti-Leviathan.

What is a liberty-minded individual to do? The central message of
Bovard’s book is a powerful one.

We must recognize
that mankind has not yet devised stable, lasting institutions that can
safeguard rights without spawning oppression.

I used to think we had. I used to think—and was taught—that America was
that stable and lasting institution. But, increasingly, I am no longer sure.

+ + +

Much of this book reads like a series of loosely connected essays.
Bovard’s focus on the two main observations I describe above comprise only a
portion of the text. The balance is a cavalcade of libertarian tropes.

The government always lies us into war:

Saddam
Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 provided a challenge for the
first Bush administration to get Americans mobilized. In September 1990, the
Pentagon announced that up to a quarter million Iraqi troops were near the
border of Saudi Arabia, threatening to give Saddam Hussein a stranglehold on
one of the world’s most important oil sources. The Pentagon based its claim on
satellite images that it refused to disclose. One American paper, the St.
Petersburg Times, purchased two Soviet satellite “images taken of that same
area at the same time that revealed that there were no Iraqi troops ‘near the
Saudi border—just empty desert.’” Jean Heller, the journalist who broke the
story, commented, “That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush
sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.” Even a decade after the
first Gulf War, the Pentagon refused to disclose the secret photos that
justified sending half a million American troops into harm’ way.

Bovard goes into some depth on this general theme, quoting some people
throughout history who observed how governments convince their citizens to go
to war. Here’s author Randolph Bourne after the United States entered World War
I:

Government,
with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts
all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations,
which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and
irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty
citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have
been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and
beneficent, it had a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war
will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper
of a bigger role in the destiny of the world.

And here’s an interesting exchange between Hermann Goering and an
interviewer during his Nuremberg trial:

Goering: “Of
course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to
risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back
to his farm in one piece. … But, after all, it is the leaders of the country
who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people
along.”

Interviewer:
“There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter
through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress
can declare wars.”

Goering:
“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is
tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any
country.”

It’s almost as if there is a science to this—to taking a nation to war.
And, if that’s so, are we fools to think that our leaders aren’t students of
that science?

Here’s another trope, that the priorities of government are surreal:

In the
spring of 2005, Congress showed vastly more enthusiasm for investigating
steroid use by baseball players than torture by the U.S. government.
Congressmen were more concerned about the sanctity of home run records than
they were about the CIA or military interrogators killing innocent people. IN
August 2005, the House Government Reform Committee opened a perjury
investigation of a baseball player who had testified to the committee that he
did not use steroids but tested positive for steroid use a few months later.
Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) piously announced that “we have a
obligation to look at this.” Perhaps this obligation to scrutinize private
misconduct is the flipside of their obligation to ignore government atrocities.

And a thing I plan to use in future arguments:

For those who continue to fail to understand how American actions
abroad can motivate foreigners to hate our government, Bovard offers one of the
most compelling “shoe on the other foot” examples I’ve come across.

Many
Americans have remained oblivious to the impact that the Abu Ghraib photos and
other torture reports have on foreigners. How would Americans have responded if
the roles had been reversed? Consider the case of Jessica Lynch, the 20-year-old
blond, blue-eyed, attractive West Virginian Army supply clerk captured after
her supply convoy was attacked during the invasion of Iraq. The Pentagon and
the Washington Post trumpeted grossly deceptive accounts of her capture and
rescue that were later exposed as frauds (and which Lynch disavowed). What if
Americans had seen photos of Lynch with blood running from cuts on her thighs,
cowering before attack dogs lurching at her? What if Americans saw photos of a
hooded Lynch with wires attached to her body, looking like she was awaiting
electrocution? What if Americans saw videos of Lynch screaming as she was being
assaulted by Iraqi captors? Such evidence would likely have swayed millions of
Americans to support dropping nuclear bomb on Iraq. And yet many Americans
refuse to recognize how similar evidence inflames Arabs’ attitudes towards the
United States.

And some things that I just didn’t know.

The Abu
Ghraib photos were only the tip of the iceberg. Far more incriminating photos
and videos of abuses existed, which Pentagon officials revealed in a slide show
for members of Congress. However, the Bush administration slapped a national
security classification on almost all of the photos and videos not already
acquired by the media. Rumsfeld told Congress that the undisclosed material
showed “acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and
inhuman.” Highlights included “American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to
death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead
body, a taping Iraqi guards raping young boys,” according to NBC News.
Suppressing this evidence enabled the Bush administration to persuade many
people that the scandal was actually far narrower than the facts would later
show.

Finally, in the course of his book, Bovard time and again gives me new
perspective on issues I had long thought were settled. For example, we’re
taught in school that, early in our nation’s history, the right to vote has
reserved only for white men who owned property. That has always struck me as
short-sighted and archaic. But read this:

In the
era of the Founders, few things were more dreaded than “dependency”—not being
one’s own man, not having a truly independent will because of reliance on
someone or something else to survive. One of the glories of America was the
possibility that common people could become self-reliant with hard work and
discipline. John Philip Reid summarized eighteenth-century political thinking:
“Property was independence; lack of property was servility, even servitude. … A
man without independent wealth could easily be bought and bribed. A man of
property has a will of his own.” This was part of the reason why many of the
states initially required a property qualification for voters. Sir William
Blackstone, whose work on the English constitution profoundly influenced
Americans, observed that a property qualification for suffrage was necessary
because if the property-less “had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of
them under some undue influence or other.” Thomas Jefferson warned: “Dependence
begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares
fit tools for the designs of ambition.”

This is a view I have never taken before, and certainly never have been
offered before. Depriving certain citizens of the right to vote still may not
be the proper course of action, but knowing that the motivation for the
property qualification was maintaining an independent electorate rather than
racism changes the view of the problem.